There are various communication possibilities for customers today. Those possibilities include cellular phones, landline phones, video phones, etc. Unfortunately, these devices seem to be diverging rather than converging. Thus, in any one person's home, a person may have a landline phone, a wireless phone, cellular phones, an Internet connection, etc. There are many users starting to give up their landline connections and use purely cellular phones for communications. However, cellular phones often have network problems or reception issues.
Further, cellular communications at a home may be subject to interference due to the structure of the house, the location of the house in a rural or a suburban area, etc. Thus, to mitigate the problems with cellular phone connections, some people maintain their landline phones. However this trend tends to be an added expense for the user. Further, there is no integration of the cellular and landline systems. Thus, cellular phones may have their own call log and voicemail history, where the landline phones have a separate call log and voicemail history. Further, the cell phones are typically associated with single persons, while the landline phones, at a house, are associated with a family or multiple users. Thus, you may call the landline phone to reach any person within the family. In contrast, a person can call one number to reach a single person who may be associated with that cell phone. These different issues with integration and the expense of communication in today's society remain a problem.
The term “Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT)” as used herein refers to digital communication standard, which is primarily used for creating cordless phone systems. DECT is used primarily in home and small office systems, but is also available in many PBX systems for medium and large businesses. DECT can also be used for purposes other than cordless phones, such as, baby monitors. Data applications also exist. DECT is further described in the ETS 300-175 series defining the air interface and ETS 300-176 defining how the DECT units should be type approved. A technical report, ETR-178, entitled “Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT); A high level guide to the DECT standardization” by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute in 1997, was also published to explain the standard. All of these publications and their progeny are incorporated herein by reference for all that they teach and for all purposes.
The term “DECT phone” or “DECT device” as used herein refers to any cordless device that can communicate wirelessly over a short range. In some embodiments, the term refers to at least one handset associated with one base station and one phone line socket. The base station allows several cordless telephones to be placed around the house or building, all of which can operate from the same telephone jack. Additional handsets may have a battery charger station, which does not plug into the telephone system. Handsets can, in embodiments, be used as intercoms, communicating between each other, and sometimes as walkie-talkies, intercommunicating without the telephone line connection.
The term “cellular communication device” as used herein refers to any mobile device that can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. The cellular communication device communicates by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile phone operator, allowing access to the public telephone network. By contrast, a cordless telephone (e.g., a DECT phone) is used only within the short range of a single, private base station. In addition to telephony, modern cellular communication devices may also support a wide variety of other services such as text messaging, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), email, Internet access, short-range wireless communications (infrared, BLUETOOTH™), business applications, gaming and photography.
The term “femtocell” as used herein refers to a small, low-power cellular base station. The femtocell may be used in a home or small business. In embodiments, the femtocell can connect to a service provider's network via a broadband connection (such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) or cable system). Current designs for the femtocell may support two to four active mobile phones in a residential setting, and eight to 16 active mobile phones in enterprise settings. A femtocell allows service providers to extend service coverage indoors or at the cell edge, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable.
The term “redirection” as used herein refers to any process where a communication, whether voice, data, or other communication, is sent to a different device than that to which the communication was directed.
The term “redirection rule” as used herein refers to any directive, whether automated or user-defined, which defines how a home communication center should redirect a received communication.
The term “communication device” as used herein refers to any device capable of conducting a communication, whether with data, voice, or video. The communication device may include cellular devices and/or DECT devices.
The term “phone call” as used herein refers to any communication session that may include voice, video, and/or data. The phone call can generally include an initiator that begins the communication session, a recipient to which the communication session is directed, and possible other participants.
The term “metadata” as used herein refers to data providing information about one or more aspects of the data. Metadata can include structural metadata that describes the design and specification of data structures, and descriptive metadata, which can describe individual instances of application data or the data content. Metadata can be stored and managed in a database, often called a Metadata registry or Metadata repository. A communication session, a device, and other modules, data, devices described herein may have one or more items of metadata associated therewith.
The term “target” as used herein refers to the recipient device as identified in a communication session initiation and/or metadata. The target can be a cellular device, a DECT device, or some other device or system.
The term “address” as used herein refers to the identifier for a recipient device as identified in a communication session initiation and/or metadata. The address can be associated with a cellular device, a DECT device, or some other device or system. Thus, the address can be a phone number, a uniform resource identifier (URL), a LAN or WAN address, etc.
The term “network” as used herein refers to a collection of devices, systems, computers, and other hardware components interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information. Where at least one process in one device is able to send/receive data to/from at least one process residing in a remote or physically-separate device, then the two devices are said to be in a network. Simply, more than one device interconnected through a communication medium for information interchange is called a network.
The terms “communicatively coupled” or “in communication with” as used herein refers to any connection, whether wired or wireless, that allows at least two devices to share information. In embodiments, when at least two devices are communicatively coupled or in communication with each other, the devices are part of a network.
The phrases “at least one”, “one or more”, and “and/or” are open-ended expressions that are both conjunctive and disjunctive in operation. For example, each of the expressions “at least one of A, B and C”, “at least one of A, B, or C”, “one or more of A, B, and C”, “one or more of A, B, or C” and “A, B, and/or C” means A alone, B alone, C alone, A and B together, A and C together, B and C together, or A, B and C together.
The term “a” or “an” entity refers to one or more of that entity. As such, the terms “a” (or “an”), “one or more” and “at least one” can be used interchangeably herein. It is also to be noted that the terms “comprising”, “including”, and “having” can be used interchangeably.
The term “automatic” and variations thereof, as used herein, refers to any process or operation done without material human input when the process or operation is performed. However, a process or operation can be automatic, even though performance of the process or operation uses material or immaterial human input, if the input is received before performance of the process or operation. Human input is deemed to be material if such input influences how the process or operation will be performed. Human input that consents to the performance of the process or operation is not deemed to be “material”.
The term “computer-readable medium” as used herein refers to any tangible storage and/or transmission medium that participate in providing instructions to a processor for execution. Such a medium may take many forms, including but not limited to, non-volatile media, volatile media, and transmission media. Non-volatile media includes, for example, NVRAM, or magnetic or optical disks. Volatile media includes dynamic memory, such as main memory. Common forms of computer-readable media include, for example, a floppy disk, a flexible disk, hard disk, magnetic tape, or any other magnetic medium, magneto-optical medium, a CD-ROM, any other optical medium, punch cards, paper tape, any other physical medium with patterns of holes, a RAM, a PROM, and EPROM, a FLASH-EPROM, a solid state medium like a memory card, any other memory chip or cartridge, a carrier wave as described hereinafter, or any other medium from which a computer can read. A digital file attachment to e-mail or other self-contained information archive or set of archives is considered a distribution medium equivalent to a tangible storage medium. When the computer-readable media is configured as a database, it is to be understood that the database may be any type of database, such as relational, hierarchical, object-oriented, and/or the like. Accordingly, the disclosure is considered to include a tangible storage medium or distribution medium and prior art-recognized equivalents and successor media, in which the software implementations of the present disclosure are stored.
The term “module” as used herein refers to any known or later developed hardware, software, firmware, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, or combination of hardware and software that is capable of performing the functionality associated with that element.
The terms “determine”, “calculate” and “compute,” and variations thereof, as used herein, are used interchangeably and include any type of methodology, process, mathematical operation or technique.
It shall be understood that the term “means” as used herein shall be given its broadest possible interpretation in accordance with 35 U.S.C., Section 112, Paragraph 6. Accordingly, a claim incorporating the term “means” shall cover all structures, materials, or acts set forth herein, and all of the equivalents thereof. Further, the structures, materials or acts and the equivalents thereof shall include all those described in the summary of the invention, brief description of the drawings, detailed description, abstract, and claims themselves.
The preceding is a simplified summary of the disclosure to provide an understanding of some aspects of the disclosure. This summary is neither an extensive nor exhaustive overview of the disclosure and its various aspects, embodiments, and/or configurations. It is intended neither to identify key or critical elements of the disclosure nor to delineate the scope of the disclosure but to present selected concepts of the disclosure in a simplified form as an introduction to the more detailed description presented below. As will be appreciated, other aspects, embodiments, and/or configurations of the disclosure are possible utilizing, alone or in combination, one or more of the features set forth above or described in detail below.